Worst appears over in Fort McMurray
FORT MCMURRAY FIRE: Residents ready to move on from the disaster images and focus on next steps
FORT MCMURRAY, Alta. — There’s a reason sleep-deprived woodland firefighters begin to see forest fires as a sentient, almost intelligent foe.
The Fort McMurray fire is moving underground. It is smouldering in peaty forest floors for days, only to explode to the surface like a hand grenade. It will sweep eastward along a wide front, or fan out into unpredictable guerrilla assaults.
It has demolished people’s homes, but leave their car unscathed just to prove it can. The fire has burned through the rear fences of homes, only to fizzle out a few metres from the back door like some kind of sick, “I’ll be back” threat.
All things considered, however, Fort McMurray emerged from a biblical firestorm in relatively good shape.
“The geese are coming back; at least something’s normal around here,” said Wood Buffalo councillor Phil Meagher, gesturing to a flight of squawking Canada geese migrating unseen above the smoke.
Still dressed in the gym clothes he threw on at the time of Tuesday’s hectic evacuation, Meagher is joined by the growing chorus of Fort McMurrayites who are somewhat miffed at the disaster images being played endlessly on televised news reports.
The downtown is fine. The hospitals survived. The Beacon Hill neighbourhood was hit the hardest, but even there the schools escaped relatively unscathed. The cemetery was skipped.
“Nobody’s mentioning that; the dead people are fine,” Meagher said.
The luckiest outcome was the fire did not penetrate forested recreational areas in the city’s core. Piled high with decades of forest debris, they would have burned like Presto logs.
Fort McMurray remains roped off to all but essential services. There are “consequences” for anybody peeling off from a convoy, and all non-uniformed persons found on the streets of Alberta’s sixth-largest city will be arrested. Some unauthorized pet rescuers already have.
The only reason the National Post was able to get in was by joining a five-vehicle relief convoy bringing supplies north. On Friday night, the convoy navigated more than 100 kilometres of highway so choked with smoke that visibility was down to about 20 metres.
It stings the eyes and, after a few minutes, induces nausea. Every smoke alarm in Fort McMurray has been ringing for days, and every curtain, awning and cushion in the city will be radiating the smell of campfire for months.
Along the roads there’s still a haphazard Walking Dead-style collection of vehicles parked at crazy angles and abandoned by panicked motorists in the first minutes of the fire.
By Saturday, the vast majority of evacuees were either in Edmonton or scattered to family and friends across Canada as far away as the Atlantic coast. The ferry service Marine Atlantic was offering free passage to any Fort McMurray evacuee trying to get their car to Newfoundland.
The Shell-owned Albian Aerodrome sprung into action to mount a staggering private airlift of evacuees trapped in the north. The airport is normally used exclusively for private 737 flights ferrying workers into the oilsands, but for several days it coordinated military and charter flights evacuating more than 7,000 people.
Buses were sent into oilsands camps hosting evacuees, transporting those evacuees to the airport where they were loaded either into a packed airliner or into the cargo hold of a C-130 Hercules.
The overarching theme of the Fort McMurray fire has been the intense, single-minded drive of Albertans to help in any way possible.
Most Canadians will fill sandbags or shelter their neighbours in times of disaster, but in the Prairies responding to tragedy is an obsession.
Last summer, Edmonton Police Constable Daniel Woodall was fatally shot while serving an arrest warrant. Police deaths are a relatively common phenomenon in other major Canadian cities, but in Edmonton it was a miniature 9/11.
Within days, virtually every light standard in the city was adorned with blue ribbons and Edmonton Police were barraged with letters, crafts and food.
It’s this spirit that Premier Rachel Notley and other officials have been referencing for the past week when they talk about “Albertans helping Albertans.”
“That’s what Albertans do when people are in need,” she said.